The Ultimate Guide On Keyword Clustering
Google is getting smarter with every passing day. The search engine is now quick to understand user intent and present accurate results to the user within a matter of seconds. Even though Google is getting smarter, businesses are still focused on limited keywords.
However, landing pages today can rank for hundreds of keywords. To do just this, keyword clustering must be performed in regards to the content. Read this blog to understand keyword clustering extensively.
What Are Keyword Clusters And Why They’re Necessary?
Keyword clusters are groups of keywords that help a page rank for multiple keywords. These clusters represent searches with similar search intent. You can take an example of a “road bicycle”, “black road bicycle”, and “gear road bicycle”. Even though they are different searches, all of the searches indicate that the user wants to buy or know about road bicycles.
If you rank only for the basic keyword i.e. road bicycle, then you reduce your traffic for the other search terms. Therefore, you can lose out on valuable traffic, conversions, and sales. That’s a huge loss for any business dealing in such services and products. A bicycle business would like to rank for all of the mentioned keywords. However, ranking for multiple, relevant keywords is possible with keyword clustering which must be performed efficiently.
With keyword clustering, a keyword can rank for its related terms as well. So, primary keywords and long-tail variants should rank for a web page. Therefore, with keyword clustering, the pages are likely to receive 10-20x traffic as a business starts appearing in searches for primary and its related keywords.
Therefore, the business increases its visibility by appearing in more searches which boosts the traffic. This further increases the traffic leading to more conversions and leads which then again increase the sales and revenue of a company. So, a business can largely benefit from keyword clusters making them necessary for any business in today’s time.
How To Get Started With Keyword Clusters?
As a business, you should know that this strategy is time-consuming despite it being highly beneficial. Keep in mind that this strategy requires intense keyword research, content creation, and overall a ton of work for the SEO and content team.
However, it’s the topic clusters that make a website Google friendly as well as user friendly. The benefits are as follows:
- Faster ranking improvements on the SERPs.
- Allows you to build authority and expertise in your niche.
- Stronger rankings for long-tail as well as short-tail keywords.
- Boosted organic traffic.
- Better opportunities for link building
Follow the steps given below to get started with keyword clustering:
1. Start With Your Keyword List
The first step is to implement extensive keyword research. First, think of the primary keyword you would want to rank for. Every business provides some core services or products for which they would like to rank. A primary keyword can vary from business to business as products and services vary for each business.
Once, you’ve decided on your primary keyword, finalize terms related to it. These will become your long-tail phrases or similar search phrases. Hence, these keywords are subtopics of the main topics that people also usually search for, therefore, maximizing your search volume.
You can also start with your business competitors and search for the terms they’re ranking for. That can be a good place to start. After this initial search, you can use a keyword tool to find similar keywords, questions, Google autocomplete, and questions that search for products and services that are similar to yours. Target these key terms to acquire your ideal audience or customers.
You can keep a track of your keyword research with the help of spreadsheets. It’s the most effective way to manage keywords. To make the data more accurate, you can also add organic ranking difficulty, CPC(Cost Per Click), and search volume. Having these parameters will assist you in prioritizing which keywords have the most value economically. Any business should aim for such keywords to get the maximum return.
The number of keywords that experts from the best SEO Company identify in their research can go up to a thousand or maybe even more. However, when starting, hundred keyword search phrases are enough to identify multiple topic clusters that a website can be built around.
Include keywords that bring the right type of audience to your website. Certainly, including the appropriate keywords for your website would attract the right audience to your website. These are the people that’ll most likely convert and give you the sales or the revenue.
2. Divide Your Keywords Into Groups
Once several keywords are selected, the next thing is to group them. Grouping the keywords allow us to arrange them. It’s automatic to notice patterns with your keywords or search phrases. Therefore, you can group the keywords by subtopics, synonyms, phrases to conveniently divide them. This leads to cluster and keyword group formation.
An example you can implement to divide keywords are:
Similar Search Intent
One effective method to differentiate keywords is through search intent. If two keywords have similar search intent, you can easily group them. Think of a landing page that consists of dissimilar keywords. It’s hard to write content on it that’ll confuse the readers as well as the search engines. However, similar search intent keywords can be easily grouped.
Search Volume And CPC(Cost-Per-Click)
Grouping and selecting keywords with search volume and CPC determines those keywords that are profitable, as well as those that have some traffic on them. Grouping the keywords as per these parameters can also be done.
Therefore, include only those keywords that have some search volume and profitable CPC.
Ranking Difficulty
Some keywords can get ranked easily, while others are tough to get a spot on. Keywords that are possible to get ranked organically should only be included in your keyword list.
With these parameters and divisions, your keyword count should reduce. But don’t fret as the aim is to focus only on relevant, profitable keywords. Within these remaining keywords, you should form keyword clusters.
3. Start Creating Your Pillar Pages With Keyword Clusters
Once you’ve decided on the keyword cluster, you’re ready to write and optimize the content for your business website. In a way, keyword clusters represent the niche topics of your website. Referred to as the “pillar pages“, they are broader and focus on educating or attracting the customer. They are lengthy and talk about topics at length.
Landing pages, on the other hand, are used more for conversion purposes and focus on individual topics.
Also, ensure that the pillar pages follow the best on-page SEO practices. A content optimization tool can help you arrange or optimize your content effectively for your overall website.
To rank your pillar pages, you should:
- Write content that covers the subject matter extensively.
- Include Your Keyword Phrase in H2 and H3, and have a solid page structure.
- Give the users a quality page experience. You can add videos, photos, links, and more to improve the page user experience.
To better the authority of your pillar pages, you can focus on blogs that cover subtopics, or questions associated with your core keywords. As the content gets added, web pages will form topic clusters on the website.
The landing pages can rank as well with a solid interlinking. If your pillar page has to rank, it has to get links from relevant website blog posts. Premium or authoritative keywords can get ranked this way and then the pillar pages can link to landing pages, thus, forming a chain or connectivity within the website. This way more visitors can access all your pages.
However, the number of landing pages and pillar pages tend to differ depending on the number of services or products that a business may have. Having some core services will lead to a small website or cluster. The point is to present keyword clusters better than your opponents and outrank them. Also, internal linking and content rely heavily on keyword clusters so they define the structure and the quality and relevancy of a website.
Adding relevant internal links and having content increases the inter-connectivity of the website. Due to this, a visitor spends more time on the website, thus increasing engagement. This also aids Google in understanding your website, since the structure of the website is well defined.
Conclusion
To sum it up, keyword cluster is a state-of-the-art SEO strategy that can give any business an edge in outperforming their competition. Unmatched indexing and Natural Language Processing(NLP) are two important ranking parameters that get satisfied with keyword clusters. Through these algorithms, Google identifies user intent and presents the best results to the user. Therefore, with your website having a solid and understandable structure due to keyword clustering, your visibility and traffic both increase, thus, boosting your sales and revenue. Still implementing the right steps as mentioned in this blog is crucial to keyword clustering and its benefits.